Another Sunday evening *
I dug the geranium up and put it in a pot. A small pot. The kind of pot you can bring indoors. With its six hundred and forty-six friends. Including quite a few geraniums, foresightfully planted in small portable pots to begin with. Last year after much grief, effort and cardboard boxes, I lost the geranium in that location after all; this year I’ll probably lose the new one to the shock of the transfer. . . . and it’ll be a mild winter so I should have left it in situ and persevered with the swaddling. There are half a dozen more I ought to dig up and put in small portable pots but that one’s in the most exposed spot. . . .
I was sure it was going to freeze last night. When hellhounds and I went back to the cottage at our usual mmgrmph o’clock** Wolfgang’s roof sparkled. I hauled indoors everything I could think of to haul indoors*** and put actual horticultural fleece jackets over a few things I could not haul indoors.† Tottered out of bed this morning†† and stuck my head out the bathroom window and . . . I still have dahlias. Peter’s got frosted. Mine didn’t. So this afternoon—my excuse was that they were ringing a quarter peal††† and I like being in the garden, when the weather cooperates, while they’re ringing—I reorganised at the cottage, so the stuff that comes indoors is a little more readily to hand and will require less swearing and bruises the next time I have to bring it all in.‡ I even planted some bulbs. It’s only October and I’m planting my bulbs. My novel may be late but my spring bulbs are going in . . . so uncharacteristically on schedule I kind of want to stop and do something else. Surely performing so unnatural an act as as getting my bulbs in punctually will unbalance the rest of my rickety life.
Right at the moment I think I’ll sing something.
* * *
* I am writing this more slowly and distractedly than usual because I’m also watching/listening to ‘Bryn and Cecilia at Glyndebourne’ http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/239250/Cecilia-Bryn-At-Glyndebourne-Arias-Duets/overview Although there are about a million links, including several lovely snippets, as for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-VtGKgvr4&feature=related which give you an idea of what a terrific show it is. . . . Er: warning to the non-fan: this is opera. And the rest of you probably know it already. This is the first time I’ve seen it; I’ve rather resisted the media sink that is Ceclia Bartoli. I’d put up with her manners if her singing didn’t sound so hysterical most of the time. She can do coloratura so by golly we’re going to have coloratura. I don’t think she could sing ‘Happy Birthday’ without throwing a few runs and spurious flourishes in, putting it over with the kind of frantic dedication you use to talk the villain out of tying your sweetheart to the railroad tracks. This gets on my easily-got-on nerves.^ But I ducked too late when the advertising bomb hit about her album ‘Maria’ a few years ago, in which she sings a lot of stuff that a media sink of the 19th century used to sing, and I not only bought it I like it. And I’ve been a drooling, weak-kneed fan of Terfel’s pretty much since he failed to win Cardiff Singer of the Year a long time ago.
Anyway, Cecilia and Bryn are amazing, and I may have to buy the frelling DVD.^^ But it fascinates me in a more than slightly farcical way how differently I watch singers now that I’m taking voice lessons. Geezum crumbs, how do they do that? Singing always was magic: it’s now a new, more intense, more detailed kind of magic. One of the things Blondel keeps getting on me for is the way I breathe: having supported your last outbreath to its final feebly oxygenated droplet, you merely relax, and your lungs are full of air again. You don’t do anything so vulgar and intemperate as breathe in, and neither your chest nor your belly should pump in and out. (And gods help you if he hears you breathe in.) I was watching Terfel’s and Bartoli’s shirt/dress fronts with fixed attention . . . and you don’t see anything except a tiny kick of diaphragm occasionally. How do they do that?
I’m also ridiculously perplexed by the effort of coming to terms with the fact that this particular instrument, frail cracked reed that it is, is a piece of my body. What an ineffably mysterious thing a trained^^^ singing voice is . . . The experience even at my minimal level is not wholly unlike finding out you can tell stories—there’s the same ‘where did that come from’ quality, aside from whether you are going to inflict the results of your discovery on an innocent world or not. But your voice is a physical thing—your imagination may feel physical (mine certainly does)—but you can’t point to an area of your body and say ‘my imagination is there.’ You can with your voice, except that it’s all tucked secretly away in your larynx. How does it do that? And when you start training it and it starts going cough spark flare, you don’t see muscle definition the way you do after you’ve been pulling on a bell rope for a while. It’s still all secretly tucked away in your larynx.
^ Mind you, my discovery of Marilyn Horne changed my life. She was the first mezzo I’d ever heard sing coloratura—I started out thinking that coloratura meant high soprano.+ . . . I have now spent upwards of half an hour trying to find a good link of Marilyn Horne doing her stuff. There doesn’t seem to be one. ++ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_yN5qyOemc both looks and sounds pretty bad, but it gives you some idea of what is possible. And a hint of Horne’s lower register. Shazzam. Oh yes, and right after I learn Che faro senza Eurydice I’m going to learn Una voce poco fa. A hellgoddess can dream.
+ I grew up ignorant, what can I tell you. I grew up listening to Verdi. Rossini and Donizetti were these little twittery people. And I don’t think I sat through an entire Handel opera till I was past 30.
++ It’s not the writing entries that takes so long, it’s the getting involved on the internet.
^^ The super high definition DVD, apparently, which means I also have to buy a new super high definition DVD player. I am tired of new technology. I have old tired eyes and old tired ears and I don’t need super high definition anything.
^^^ Whether you’ve had voice lessons or not. Some people just have singing voices. Some of us have to work at it.
** Frell. And I have to get up on Sunday morning. However, the question is irrelevant at present. See following footnote.
*** I am, at present, not sleeping very well. Let me rephrase that: I haven’t had any sleep to speak of since Thursday night. If I am not expressing myself. In complete sentences. This is not. Surprising. Last night as I lay there wide awake anyway I thought of a lot of little tender things I had not brought indoors.^ That I was not, at that point, quite going to get out of bed again for. Besides, I haven’t got any more indoor space. Come on, McKinley, will you get your act together and haul some stuff up to Third House’s greenhouse? What did you buy all that bubble wrap for?^^
^ Frelling dranglefab, what happened to the–? . . . If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for at mmgrmph o’clock, in the dark, you’re not going to find it.
^^ Possibly to insulate the neighbours from my singing.
† With the geranium out of the way I can try putting a nightshirt over the borderline-tender rose in that too-big-to-bring-indoors^ pot.
^ I am also not going to drag it up and down stairs. Check previous photos for details.
†† At the revoltingly early hour incumbent on Sundays
††† And I can’t work on PEGASUS all day. No! I can’t!
‡ It is NOT supposed to freeze tonight.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.